was there
sufficiently stamped to make them hesitate to touch it. Besides, the
things of the sepulchre must be left in the spot which they select. In
short, the relic was a strange one. A Marquise had slept in it; Marat
had rotted in it; it had traversed the Pantheon to end with the rats
of the sewer. This chamber rag, of which Watteau would formerly have
joyfully sketched every fold, had ended in becoming worthy of the fixed
gaze of Dante.

The whole visit to the subterranean stream of filth of Paris lasted
seven years, from 1805 to 1812. As he proceeded, Bruneseau drew,
directed, and completed considerable works; in 1808 he lowered the arch
of the Ponceau, and, everywhere creating new lines, he pushed the
sewer, in 1809, under the Rue Saint-Denis as far as the fountain of
the Innocents; in 1810, under the Rue Froidmanteau and under the
Salpetriere; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Peres, under the Rue
du Mail, under the Rue de l'Echarpe, under the Place Royale; in 1812,
under the Rue de la Paix, and under the Chaussee d'Antin. At the same
time, he had the whole net-work disinfected and rendered healthful. In
the second year of his work, Bruneseau engaged the assistance of his
son-in-law Nargaud.

It was thus that, at the beginning of the century, ancient society
cleansed its double bottom, and performed the toilet of its sewer. There
was that much clean, at all events.

Tortuous, cracked, unpaved, full of fissures, intersected by gullies,
jolted by eccentric elbows, mounting and descending illogically, fetid,
wild, fierce, submerged in obscurity, with cicatrices on its pavements
and scars on its walls, terrible,--such was, retrospectively viewed, the
antique sewer of Paris. Ramifications in every direction, crossings,
of trenches, branches, goose-feet, stars, as in military mines, coecum,
blind alleys, vaults lined with saltpetre, pestiferous pools, scabby
sweats, on the walls, drops dripping from the ceilings, darkness;
nothing could equal the horror of this old, waste crypt, the digestive
apparatus of Babylon, a cavern, ditch, gulf pierced with streets, a
titanic mole-burrow, where the mind seems to behold that enormous blind
mole, the past, prowling through the shadows, in the filth which has
been splendor.

This, we repeat, was the sewer of the past.

CHAPTER V--PRESENT PROGRESS

To-day the sewer is clean, cold, straight, correct. It almost realizes
the ideal of what is understood in England b